Mark Halperin

All right, next up, my report and my luck.

Throughout my career, as I've talked to people in both parties in politics, there's an irony when it comes to the question of messaging, right?

Not the policies, but the messaging, the communication, how it's talked about.

Both sides say the same thing.

They always say our side, say the Republicans will say about the Democrats and vice versa, our side's not good at messaging.

They are so good at messaging.

Our policies are better, but they're so good at messaging.

But then they also say all the time, you know, the other side's missing the opportunity.

They have a winning message.

If they would only stick to it, but they don't stick to the winning message, they get off on tangents.

So it's weird because those things obviously are internally inconsistent.

Now, the press always has a point of view about what the right message should be, and they get that from talking to consultants.

So consultants will say, well, the president should be talking about the economy, but he shouldn't be saying it's too good because if he says it's too good, people will feel that he doesn't feel their pain.

The press tends to, as it is another asymmetrical bias, tends to be more critical about Republican candidates and presidents who are off message than Democrats, particularly Donald Trump, right?

Joe Biden was off message all the time.

But Donald Trump is famously talks about things maybe he shouldn't talk about, or at least that's a lot of the consultants in the press says.

I think back to 2008, when Barack Obama ended up beating John McCain so easily.

But McCain gave one speech shortly after he became the Republican nominee.

He gave one speech about reform and about special interests.

And the Democrats saw that speech and they said, if that's the message that John McCain has for the rest of this campaign, he's going to be very tough to beat.